PetPortal
Pet care in your pocket.
Pet-maintenance and upkeep is a two-way street: pets deserve the best care that their owners can provide for them, but pet owners also deserve the ability to not stress over their furry little friends 24/7. Maybe even take a vacation once in a while, knowing that your pet-sitter has all the info he or she could need?
PetPortal aims to simplify the lives of pet owners. The PetPortal mobile application affords pet owners the resources to properly keep up with all of their pet’s needs, such as medications, vet appointments, as well as their daily recreational time outside, all stored within their PetPass.
Gone are the days of hurriedly typing out instructions for pet-sitters the night before you leave for vacation. Once a PetPass is set up on the application, it can be stored within your Apple Wallet, and sent to pet-sitters, without them having to download the app.
The Problem
How can pet owners and any other third parties involved in the pet care process, effectively and efficiently tend to all of their pets’ needs?
The Solution
PetPortal wants to streamline pet care for among members of the same household as well as between household and pet sitter or caregiver. We want to create one place where all of the pets of the same household can have their relevant information stored. Overall, PetPortal wants to simplify pet care, so that pets are getting the highest quality care that they all deserve.
Outline of Project Features
The four main features of PetPortal are the PetPass, the MyEvents tab, the MyVet tab and the MyPets tab. The PetPass is designed to be transferable through Apple Wallet and is created upon entering the information for a pet. The PetPass has all of the relevant information that you or someone who is taking care of your pet would need to aid in pet care. If you have a reminder for your pet, simply click on the “calendar” icon, and add any appointments or reminders in the events page. The MyVet tab is simply a part of the app that displays all relevant vet information that may come in handy when you’re in a pinch or simply just to have all of the information conglomerated in one spot. Lastly, the MyPets tab is where pet owners would find each individual pet profile with respective pet pass. Each pet profile has all of the information needed to compile a PetPass.
Potential Impact
PetPortal would simply have an impact on an individual scale or different demographics. Pet owners are mostly comprised of 18–34 year olds. Farmers obviously have a lot of animals, so may be more willing to use the app due to the ability to have many different pets’ information in your pocket at one time. The impact of PetPortal would simply apply to those who used it. For example, Nicole has 25 animals, so having an app like this greatly appeals to her and her family. On a personal level, it can limit the amount of stress that pet care can have on an individual. Having pets can be a stressful task sometimes, but PetPortal is designed to ease the burden of pet care.
Technologies
We used three main technologies for the creation of PetPortal. The one that houses the code for the app is Xcode through the SwiftUI coding language. Xcode is designed to be used on MacOS to develop digital experiences for various Apple products. In this context, Xcode was the platform that we used to code our entire app interface with the assistance of a few Adobe products. In order to make some of the graphics and icons, we used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Photoshop was mainly used to create our prototypes and digital icons. Adobe Illustrator, on the other hand, was the software that we used in order to make sure that our images were all vector-based.
Lessons Learned
One of the main lessons that we learned in 7005 is to make that style guide and that design system as beefy as possible.
Having a comprehensive, organized and professional style guide and design system will help you with everything else in the long run. Having all of the rules and colors and fonts all in one place is one thing, but actually working on it and changing it until you have a perfect finished product is another thing. We wished that ours had been a bit more organized and comprehensive, because it definitely would have helped us a bit as we went through our journey.
Another lesson that we learned is that you can never do enough research. With that being said, don’t let your research eat into time that needs to be used on other aspects of your journey.
The first few days of our research, we really did not find too much that helped us on our project. We thought that we may have hit a dead end and need to start fresh. After we dug our heels in, we found sources that led us to other places that really helped us gather credible information that would help us in the early stages of our project. We probably could have found even more solid research, but as you know, this journey is only for those who are comfortable driving in the fast lane.
EM and Capstone Journey
Our emerging media capstone team formed just five months ago in July of 2021. At the time, we had no idea what we were in for. We did not really have any ideas for what we wanted to do for our project. After trialling a few different ideas, we ended up on PetPortal. PetPortal was a unique idea that contained value, but, more importantly, we felt like we would really like working on this idea for a year. We wanted to make sure that we had a project that was both fun and feasible, and PetPortal found that perfect balance.
Now began the research phase. We all had to do hours of research to figure out if people would actually use this app. If there was no need for it, why create it in the first place? We quickly found out that 67% of American households have at least one pet, and that number is only going up with each passing year. We also discovered that people who own more pets also have more money on average. Okay, now we have a broad demographic of people who would hopefully be willing to use our app, but we needed to center our focus a bit. Upon further research, we discovered that the age range that is most likely to own a pet lies in the 18–34 range, which is the age demographic that is the most comfortable using technology. Now, we have an app that has value to a large portion of people, and, if made correctly, those people would be able to use it with a small learning curve (hopefully).
It was one thing to have an idea for an app, but it is completely different to have an idea for an app that has value. Our first idea for what PetPortal would be was basically our own version of a platform already in existence called Pet Desk. The idea of having a pet profile was not new, so we had to go back to the drawing board. We needed more features, and, more importantly, a new feature. Our take on a pet care app transformed in the matter of hours. We decided on having an app that allowed for the transferability of pet information with just the click of a button. We wanted to implement the PetPass through the use of Apple Wallet. Our competitive advantage was to use the Apple Wallet as a place to store individual passes that could be transferred to whoever may need it.
That summer was mainly filled with us getting to know each other. We had only just met, but we just signed up for a whole year of working on an app that dictated our entire graduate school program. We were nervous, but we were ready. We really learned how to work in a group and how to lay the foundation for creating a finished and consumable digital product. The fall was filled with a lot of research, iterating and more iterating. Not to mention a lifetime’s worth of coding in only four months.
All of our emerging media classes helped us along the way. NMIX 6111 helped us learn valuable design skills to make an app that was both aesthetically pleasing and had the right content. NMIX 4110 gave us valuable coding skills in html, css, javascript and other languages that laid the foundation for the code that we needed to apply to our app and website. JRMC 7010 taught us how to design to optimize user experience. We learned what people like and did not like about apps and other digital platforms. JRMC 7011 taught us how to iterate. Iterate, iterate, iterate. We learned how to best work in groups on digital experiences. We learned how to brainstorm ideas, put them on a digital canvas and make them better and better until we finally got to a finished product that we could all be proud of. NMIX 6310 gave us all of the X Code knowledge that we needed to actually make the thing. NMIX 7005 actually had us make the alpha and beta versions of the app. NMIX 8016 further taught us how to design effectively and with purpose.
We could have done a simple website for a company that we did not really care about. We decided to do something that we knew was going to challenge us, but we knew we would be so proud of it in the end. One word that we could use to describe our time in this program would be “pride.” We are so proud of ourselves for pushing ourselves and stepping out of our comfort zones.
Advice for Future Cohorts
We have a few pieces of advice for the next cohort:
The first one is to find that balance between something that you will enjoy working on for a year, but also make sure that you are challenging yourself to do something difficult, yet feasible.
I think that we may have strayed a bit too far away from something that we were capable of, so we lost a bunch of hair and may have added too much stress into our lives.
The second piece of advice that we have is to keep your journal as you go along.
I am glad that we followed this piece of advice to some extent, because we often jotted something down in here that we thought of at the moment. You’ll thank yourself at the end of each semester if you keep this thing going throughout each process of your journey.
Lastly, take some pictures. As we are approaching the end of our emerging media journey, we wish that we had taken a bit more time to get away from all of the seriousness of the program.
Become friends with your groupmates or others in your cohort. Odds are, you have a few of the same interests as them. Take some pictures of your journey and of your project creation. It’s something you’ll look back on in the future and remember something that you truly made from the ground up, and no one can ever take that from you.
Lastly, and arguably the most important lesson is to use all of the resources that you have.
We made the mistake of not thinking that the NMI experts would be able to help very much, because they are students just like us. Guess what? Some people just have a knack for some of this stuff more than you do, and that is okay. We were at a bit of a roadblock in our coding phase, and after just one or two sessions with an expert, we were able to find a solution that got us over that hump. Use the experts and use your teachers. They are only there to help us along this journey.